India’s only film at the 96th Academy Awards – the documentary feature To Kill A Tiger – fell at the final hurdle at the prestigious award ceremony. While the film had secured a nomination, it eventually lost out in the Best Documentary Feature Film category to Ukraine’s critically-acclaimed film 20 Days in Mariupol.
To Kill A Tiger is based on the fight for justice a family of farmers has to undertake after their 13-year-old daughter is brutally gangraped. While the film was not entered from India (as it is a Canadian production), it boasts of some high-profile Indian and Indian-origin artistes as executive producers, including Priyanka Chopra, Dev Patel, Mindy Kaling, and Rupi Kaur.
The film is directed by Nisha Pahuja and was originally released in the US in select theatres in October 2023 without a distributor. After its Oscar nomination in February, it found a larger re-release across North America. The same week, Netflix acquired worldwide distribution rights for the film, planning to releasing it globally.
To Kill A Tiger is finally available to watch in India, having released worldwide on Sunday, March 10. Priyanka Chopra, one of the executive producers of the film, praised it. Speaking to People, she said, “I seek and attach myself to work that really pushes the conversations of issues that I feel close to or passionate about, and sexual violence against women definitely is one of them. In India, we say one-third of women in India have experienced sexual violence, and that statistic has to be higher because of underreporting.”
20 Days in Mariupol, the film that eventually beat To Kill A Tiger, is the story of a team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol amid the Russian invasion, struggling to continue their work documenting the war's atrocities. The other three nominees in the category were Bobi Wine: People’s President, The Eternal Memory, and Four Daughters.
In India, the Oscars streamed live on Disney+ Hotstar.
